Messages; Bottles

Back in the early ‘90s, when I was working full-time as a freelancer, a simple allegory of the writing life came to me that has never quit: writing feels like painstakingly preparing a single, extraordinarily challenging page—an illuminated manuscript or a space station blueprint or a breakup letter in ancient Sumerian—then folding up said page into a paper airplane and throwing it out the window. Even though my writing is not especially personal, a lot of it still feels like...